The Globe and Mail's Andre Picard on some weaknesses identified in medical reporting and about a new service called mediadoctor.ca.

An excerpt:

One study about coverage of health stories on Australian television concluded that news media have a "bias toward bizarre stories, and those that issue moral warnings, discredit well-known people, spruik medical 'breakthroughs' or affirm folk remedies." ("Spruik" is an Australian term that means to promote shamelessly.)

Another study on the quality of reporting on prescription drugs in Canadian newspapers found that two-thirds of the stories failed to report any side effects (and all drugs, even aspirin, have side effects). Journalists also failed most of the time to report on costs and on conflicts-of-interest, such as the financial ties between researchers and drug companies.

Research of this sort has spurred efforts to scrutinize health reporting more closely and systematically.

The first such move came in Australia with the creation of Media Doctor, a website which publishes quality assessments and critiques of articles in the lay press about medical treatments, including drugs, procedures and diagnostic tests.

Now, Canada has its own Media Doctor (http://www.mediadoctor.ca) that the public can consult.

Alan Cassels, a drug policy researcher at the University of Victoria and co-author of the best-selling book Selling Sickness: How the World's Big Pharmaceutical Companies are Turning Us All Into Patients, is the driving force behind the initiative.

He said the primary goal of Media Doctor is to "improve the accuracy of media reports about new medical treatments" and to "clean out lots of the hype about new treatments, especially drug treatments."